At the place where Fumiko's spaceship assaulted the world of Alwyne, the world reacted. Just like a hurt, living thing that has found an arrow lodged in it's side. The earth shakes and caves in where her ship plummets into it from the sky. The sound of its landing is like an explosion, and ushering out from that spot there is a ferocious wind that rustles through all the trees of the Emerald Forest and brings havoc to the wood.
The rush of wind tears through thick underbrush that the Caravan could never have crossed. It creates its own path through the forest, as it rips apart the green. The trees themselves stand strong. They can not be felled by a gust of wind, not unless they take a strike from a tornado. But their little and dead branches spin off, and their leaves become kites. From the ground on up grass comes kicking and thrashing out into the air.
The wind runs on through the Emerald Green howling like a woman in childbirth. For most, this is just a sound: the rush of air hitting plants and making animals scream in confusion. There is a proud buck who struggles against it, believing (in its own, animal way) that it can beat back the air with its ten-point antlers, the way it beats away rival males. It comes the closest, of all the living creatures of the Emerald Forest, to hearing what the wind is trying to say. It spins around him for a second, but it is fruitless. It passes him by too, and comes to someone else.
Athulwin, Sayer of the Uttering Monks, was just inviting Malleck into his Caravan. This is an invitation made with just the smallest fleck of reluctance: Athulwin is not certain how he feels about Malleck. The dogman is an aggravating personality, in the precise way that actual dogs are aggravating. Which is to say, he's the kind of person who shows up unannounced and calls out your name from the door. He is
that breed. A talker, an extrovert, a ray of bright light shining in your eye. But it does help that Athulwin is an admirer of hard-learned skills, things that someone can do that they've worked hard at mastering until it has become nearly a part of them, just as he finds it in his heart to appreciate Gru's cheesemaking even while he knows Gru to be repulsive.
He feels the same tug of admiration when he looks into Malleck's eyes. The Ainok surely will never know it, but Athulwin has often listened to his music when he plays for a crowd. The sweet notes of his voice or whatever instrument he was able to get ahold of float up into the air and are borne by the insane flourishes of Wind to Athulwin, who listens wrapped up in his Caravan. He knows music to be not just a pleasure, but a focuser for the mind. He'll let it play on while he chants the
Breviary. The good Sayer does this as he does all things. Quietly, and without admitting it.
But no sooner have the words "
Would you like to come in?" left his mouth do they become irrelevant. They become irrelevant because Athulwin is no longer standing in the door of his Caravan. He is kneeling on the ground, his knees in the dirt of the earth. The Wind has found him. It has grabbed him like a great hand and thrown him forward out of his home, down to the ground, where it can begin to scream at him.
The Wind pours out all that it has witnessed into his unwilling ears. That Something has fallen out of the sky, it says. It says that there's Something foreign burying itself into the soil. There is Something that has fallen from the sky and it is of shining and smooth and strong and large, and it is of burning with heat, the Wind says. And it brings with it the sound of an explosion, a great
BOOM! that follows just behind itself. Athulwin clutches at his ears. For anyone else in the world, nearly, this commotion of air coming forth through the forest would have just been a sudden burst. It might have blown their hair and ruffled their clothes, but quickly moved on past them, as a rushing wind is meant to, and that is surely what it did for every other soul in the Caravan. This is the natural way. Not for Athulwin; he is attuned to Wind; it chooses to stay swirling about him in a circle and keeps on doubling-back to blow by his caravan again, in its own incomprehensible language saying more things to him every time.
A windstorm of maybe ten feet across, the world's tiniest natural disaster, is forming. With all of the air spirit's frantic energy and excitement- it's childlike excitement- flowing into him, Athulwin feels his heart rising up in panic. Wind talks at sixty-five miles an hour. But he is able, taking the deepest breaths he can and focusing his mind as much as he is able to focus his mind while he's being shouted at, to Utter something in the language of the Wind. He gets out just one word:
Stop. This is the most dangerous and the most rarely used word in the language of Winds, because it is a synonym for death. As it leaves his lips, it is obeyed, and he has killed the Wind that was assaulting him. It stops blowing. Suddenly, very suddenly, there is a calm.
The Sayer has to spend a few moments with his hands in the soil to right himself. He stays motionless while letting in loud, deep breaths of the stilled air. Curse this Curse, he thinks. It has him so weak... he should not have been brought down like that. Wind is notoriously mercurial. Whatever it is that fell from the sky startled the nearby air enough to send it sprinting like that, and it wouldn't mind trampling Athulwin to the ground to tell its share of the story. The Sayer who dabbles in this tongue must be one who is always ready for unexpected happenings, important moments that come and then go without any warning at all. His monastery teachers would have reminded him. Athulwin swears at himself.
He explains what he can to Malleck. Tells him that the air which was going through the forest spoke to him. ("
You know that it does that, of course, Master Freepaw. It was rather energetic this time. I am sorry if it frightened you.") Here is where he makes the mistake of trying, like a fool, to stand up. He is able to get his leg halfway up before he stumbles back down onto the ground again. That's not the Wind this time. It's not an excited spirit with the personality of a toddler who hasn't learned not to push yet; it is Athulwin's own body stopping him from standing himself up, being too weak and far too old for someone with only 37 winters on the clock. The damned Curse. The sinking, shameful feeling in his gut as he realizes that he's not going to be able to stand up by himself. It's not the first time. Every time it feels like a little death.
"
Master Freepa- Malleck," he says, a flicker of flame forming in his throat at having to ask. "
Could you help me up? I, well, that is- I need someone to prop up on, I think."
--- ~--( )--~ ---
Although nobody knows it, at the very same moments that Gadri is sawing Fumiko free far away deeper in the forest, it comes to pass that Athulwin realizes what has happened. All the pieces come together in his mind at once, just like a puzzle. He nearly wishes it hadn't.
He was sitting with his hands folded over his thick and leatherbound copy of the Eld Breviary. He was in his favorite (and only) sitting spot in the caravan, a little bench-like table that strikes out from one wall opposite the door. He's covered the seats of it with blankets and pillows, but the top of it tends to stay strangely empty. There is a nearly finished cup of tea, and the Breviary, and that is all. Athulwin finds a little bit of empty space absolutely necessary for being able to think clearly. Clutter in your environment amounts to clutter in your thoughts. A million little objects screaming "I'm right over here! I'm taking up space right here!" It's an itching distraction that often makes his soul long for the austere, mostly-empty, half-abandoned halls of the Monastery (which was a structure meant to house twice as many monks as it did.)
And while he was at that table, thinking, he couldn't get one particular idea out of his head. It kept buzzing back around into his thoughts whenever he tried to dismiss it. Somehow, he just couldn't explain it, he felt that he should have seen this coming. Whatever that newborn Wind had been trying to tell him: that Something has come to the world which doesn't belong here, and that it fell from the sky. Those words were oddly familiar, but in the way that a bad dream is familiar. You don't really want to remember. You want to forget it. Still, there it is, tickling the back of your brain. It finally came to him as he drained the last swallow out of the tea.
The Stars, just before the Caravan came into the Emerald Forest, had given him one of their most Odd warnings. All of the Stars messages and warnings are cryptic by nature- but this one was its own unique genre of cryptic, a kind of strange that Athulwin hadn't heard before. It was under a clear dark sky that he had been speaking to them when these words came uninvited into his mind:
"
Cursed One, Traveller:
Something falls from us. It is not of us.
A Note from Another Song. Alwyne does not know it.
How can a story be told with Foreign Words?
It will cut the sky's face."
It made no sense to him then. Now it does. Add it to what the wind said. Consider the orange bolt that everyone saw flying across the blue sky today, like a cut across a face. Remember the way Gadri and Morvanne ran off to find what they thought would be starmetal, that mysterious resource that can only come down from above. All the clues fit together with an almost audible click.
Something has landed on Alwyne. It comes from someplace else, far away above the sky. It isn't part of our little world at all.Some of the Uttering Monks believed in such things. A younger Athulwin, a boy in the Monastery, thought they were insane. But there are poems in the oldest of the oldest of their scriptures that imply certain things live beyond the world of Alwyne, either far above it or far below it, where no man's eyes could catch them. The Beyonders. They existed outside of Eld Frowen's Great Story, and had no natural part in it. This is why they are dangerous. All the world of Alwyne, as the Uttering Monks describe it, is like a story being told by their god Eld Frowen. Everything that
is, is something Eld Frowen once said.
Athulwin remembers some of the most sensitive monks prefering to comparing it to a song instead- but that doesn't change the meaning much. Then you would simply say that all things are notes in Frowen's song, working together to create a melody only He can hear. The birds, the sunrise, goblins, the dwarves, thieves, and everyone they take from, preachers and every soul they convert- all are simply a part of the Song of Frowen. His Great Story.
But Athulwin also recalls one night, him and a group of young faithful were going over those stranger scriptures that speak of things above the stars. One of them was a freckly, lanky lad with eyes that were uncomfortably glassy and fish-like- his name was Beornheard, and he was drunk. Slurring his words together, he still managed to swear up and down that he heard from an uncle in Yellmarsh, who heard from a friend, who knew a scholar, who said that the Beyonders were real. Everyone nodded politely at this and tried to move on. But the drunkard seemed to like the subject of Beyonders and wouldn't be taken off of it. He said that the scriptures really did imply ("Whether you believe me or not,
Athulwin, this is what they say") that the Beyonders were natural anathema to Eld Frowen and everything else in the world of Alwyne. The scriptures called them Foreign Words. Things that shouldn't exist in the spoken Story of Frowen, and disrupted it even by
being there. And they only ever come from the stars.
Athulwin suppresses a shutter. Something foreign, a thing not of the Great Story, has come to Alwyne today. A Foreign Word. A Beyonder. The stupid drunk was right.
He sends a message, carried by the wind, to Gadri and Morvanne. He prays it isn't too late. The words of the message are simple:
"Stay away from that thing."
